Friday, January 07, 2005
(6:30 PM) | Old - Doug Johnson:
Nine Theses and Two Supertheses
Hello to all; thank you to Adam for allowing me to air my hairbrained ideas. I've been inundating him and a gauche with e-mails lately and have collapsed the discussion to nine theses and two supertheses. The first superthesis will hopefully be defended before January is out as an untimely last addition to Paul Week (feel free to update with a hyper-link if you are able). Here goes:1. Hebraic counter-histories perenially undermine claims to sovereignty by positing a law that is both older and more divinely inspired than that of the King or State (Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, especially lecture 4, cf. Robert Cover's "The Supreme Court Term, 1982 Term: Foreword: Nomos and Narrative, Harvard Law Review 1983, 97 Harv. L. Rev. 4).
2. Hebraic counter-histories have also produced the worst forms of xenophobic nationalism and empire (Society Must Be Defended), especially when combined with Christian supersessionism (interestingly Foucualt dropped both 1 and 2 when he moved from lecture to writing in "Right of Death and Power Over Life").
3. To oppose a universal empire, a countervailing universal politics is required (Badiou).
4. What really scares the hell out of modern market politics is no longer communism (a la Badiou), at least by itself, but rather Islam.
5 a. The underappreciated source of Islam's revolutionary power is an insistence on Sharia as universal law.
b. Politics is law
or
Political animals are juridical animals
6. Like Empire, Revolutionary Islamic law unfortunately is alloyed with violence and is thus subject to Benjamin's 'Critique of Violence' as well as the Sermon on the Mount (referred to hear as a strategy among others - see superthesis 2).
7. For 18 centuries plus, Jewish Law, while having a weak claim to universality (so-called Noachide law), sustained without violence the only unassimilated community in the Christian West.
8. Nomos and narrative are integrally interrelated, particularly with respect to non-violent Jewish law (Cover, see thesis 1).
9. St. Paul, for good contingent reasons, universalized only the Hebraic narrative, leaving Hebraic law, at best, localized.
The best hope for apocalyptically blowing the lid off the political pot (Taubes) is the political jurisprudence neither babylonian nor Islamic contained in the following two Supertheses:
1. Paul's temporary suspension of the juridical must now be lifted.
2. The situation of Acts 1-14 must now be elevated to the status of event since the four cornerstones of a truly universal, revolutionary politics are Torah (properly interpreted), Pacifism (power is diffuse), Communism ("they had all things in common"), and Evangelism (multiplication of militant cells).
As an answer to the objection that Torah demands death for various offenses including queer sex, see thesis 7.
